Summary
TalentOS connects the people a provider has qualified to the employers who need them. It holds graduate profiles, verified skills, employers, opportunities, and the matching between them — plus the placement outcomes that are, for most funders, the number that actually matters.
Two design decisions shape how it behaves, and both are deliberate:
- Profiles are private by default, and discovery is off by default. A learner is not entered into a talent marketplace because they enrolled. They opt in.
- It builds on the existing job board rather than replacing it. Opportunities posted through the older board are the same opportunities TalentOS matches against.
Who This Guide Is For
- Placement and work-integrated-learning coordinators
- Executives reporting employment outcomes to funders
- Employers hiring from a provider’s graduates
- Learners looking for work
Prerequisites
- Learners who have completed, or are close to completing, a programme
- At least one employer relationship worth formalising
- A clear position on what you will and will not share about a learner
Step 1: Understand the Consent Model First
Navigate to Talent → Settings.
Before anything is published, know what is shared. A talent profile carries field-level permissions: a learner can expose their qualifications without exposing their contact details, and can grant a specific employer access without joining a public directory.
Do not treat this as a setting to relax later. A provider that publishes learner data by default and asks afterwards has a POPIA problem, not a configuration problem.
Step 2: Build Graduate Profiles
Navigate to Talent → Graduates.
A profile draws on what the platform already knows — completed programmes, assessment outcomes, verified credentials, workplace hours — rather than asking the learner to retype it. What the learner adds is the part the system cannot know: what they want to do, where they can work, what else they have done.
Skills on a profile can be asserted (the learner says so) or verified (evidence in the system supports it). The distinction is shown, never averaged. An employer reading a profile can see which is which, and that is the profile’s whole credibility.
Step 3: Onboard Employers
Navigate to Talent → Employers.
Capture the employer, their sector, their sites and the people you deal with. Employer verification matters: a verified employer has been checked, and learners are told which employers have been.
Step 4: Post Opportunities
Navigate to Talent → Opportunities.
An opportunity is a job, a learnership placement, an internship or a work-experience slot. Capture the requirements honestly — matching works from them, and a requirement list padded with things that are not really required produces matches nobody wants.
Step 5: Match, and Read the Explanation
Navigate to Talent → Matching.
Matching proposes candidates for an opportunity and explains why each was proposed. Read the explanation before acting on the ranking.
There is deliberately no single candidate score and no ranking by demographic facets. A number would invite people to treat it as an assessment of the person, and matching is an assessment of fit between a person and one opportunity. The components are shown separately so a coordinator can disagree with one of them.
Step 6: Track Placement Through to an Outcome
Navigate to Talent → Placement.
Record what actually happened: applied, interviewed, offered, placed, still employed at three months, at six, at twelve. The last of those is what turns a placement statistic into an employment outcome, and it is the one most often not captured.
Talent → Employability aggregates this across cohorts and programmes: which programmes place well, which do not, and how quickly.
Step 7: The Learner’s Side
Learners use My Talent to control their profile and sharing, and My Talent → Opportunities to browse and apply. Point them at it during their final phase, not after they leave — a learner who has left is a learner who is hard to reach.
What Good Looks Like
- Learners have opted in knowingly, not by default
- Verified and asserted skills are visibly distinguished
- Employment outcomes are captured at three, six and twelve months
- Employers on the system are verified
Common Mistakes
- Publishing profiles by default. It is the wrong default legally and the wrong default ethically.
- Padding opportunity requirements. It breaks matching.
- Stopping at “placed”. Placement is an event; employment is an outcome.
- Reading the match ranking without the explanation. The explanation is the product.